If history tells us anything it is, first, that art about sport is usually a bad idea, and secondly, that artists never learn this. The Olympic Games have always been a tempting subject. Big jumps, taut thighs, twanging javelins: few artists can behold these marvels without feeling the urge to inadequately recreate them.

The Theban poet Pindar and his rival Bacchylides , who both wrote victory odes in the fifth century BCE, were surely not the first to get sucked in. As Pindar gushes in a poem for the Isthmian games: "To a poet's mind the gift is slight, to speak/ A kind word for unnumbered toils, and build/ For all to share a monument of beauty."

No doubt these words were pinned to Jilly Cooper 's study wall while she composed her steam'n'stirrups epic Riders. Cooper's novel takes equal joy in the physical accomplishments of its heroes, two male showjumpers, whose rivalry reaches its sweaty climax at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, by when no character, of any species, has been left unstraddled.

Harder to say is what Whitney Houston had in mind when she recorded the unbearably dreary One Moment in Time for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. Like Riders, however, this too became a giant hit. (Thankfully The Ringer, Johnny Knoxville 's movie about a man pretending to be disabled to win the Special Olympics, did not.)

Less awful was John Candy 's film Cool Runnings, which follows an incompetent Jamaican bobsleigh team as they prepare for the Olympics. Indeed, comedy may well be the best lens through which to look at the Olympics. Despite its identical premise to The Games , a mockumentary about the organisers of Sydney 2000, the BBC's Twenty Twelve makes great fun out of London's preparations.

That said, it would be difficult to name a film with fewer laughs than Leni Riefenstahl 's Olimpia, a documentary of the 1936 Olympics commissioned as Nazi propaganda. Yet, despite its vile purpose, Olimpia's innovations make it one of the cornerstones of cinema, and - pace Pindar- probably the greatest work of art about the Olympics. Knoxville, sadly, was not available at the time.